Micro.blog open to all

”Micro.blog is now available to anyone. There’s a limit of 100 new sign-ups each day, so that we can better respond to feedback as the community grows.”

This year has been one of significant change for me, as I’ve said before, thanks in no small part to the influence of micro.blog and how it has made me think about how I should treat my own site.

So, what is micro.blog and why should you use it?

Rather than just another social network m.b is a network of “micro blogs” that lets you follow and reply to other people in a Twitter-like timeline but the posts don’t solely exist within that timeline, they live on the blogs and are brought in via RSS.

I personally tend to think of micro.blog as like an RSS reader with a social layer allowing you to comment on other people’s posts via the timeline. It’s very much a hybrid environment and what it does depends on how you use it.

In addition to having blogs hosted on the service itself you can hook it up to your own site - as I do with this WordPress blog. This lets you post either via your own site or the m.b apps or website and, if your blog supports IndieWeb Webmentions, receive any replies as native comments. In that regard, I use micro.blog as a comment system like Disqus.

It’s this distinction that justifies why I still engage in a quasi-social environment when I have sworn off of the likes of Twitter.

The benefit of using micro.blog is that you own your posts and can, should you want to, automatically cross-post them to Twitter or Facebook as the service supports this. The IndieWeb is not out to replace existing social avenues but to interact with them while allowing people to retain greater ownership and control.

If you have your own blog but don’t want a separate microblog you don’t need to do anything differently, just hook up your RSS feed and simply use it as an extra layer of engagement.

We put so much on social networks and the majority is quickly lost and forgotten - it’s such a waste of effort. I firmly believe that people should get back to writing for themselves in their own spaces and micro.blog is a great facilitator for this.